Listening to a good story on the radio is akin to being on a long car trip with someone you love to be around.

You're not looking at each other, you're simply gazing out the window. So you talk more, and they talk more, and as the world passes by everyone listens more.

"That's a crazy magic kind of situation for listening to somebody and for speaking," says Ira Glass, host and creator of the public radio program "This American Life." He's talking over the phone from his office at WBEZ in Chicago. "I think with radio, when it's really working, that's the feeling that you get. The fact that you don't see the people makes it better."

And while Glass maintains that this invisible screen between listener and speaker makes the act of seeing people from the radio "inevitably disappointing," he's taken his show on the road to give fans a taste of favorite moments from "This American Life," as well as behind-the-scenes glimpses into what goes into the making of a radio show that reaches more than 1.7million listeners each week.

"Radio Stories and Other Stories: An Evening with Ira Glass" will take place this Saturday night at the Sunset Center in Carmel.

When Glass first created the radio show that would become "This American Life," he found a niche that was left vacant by other radio programs.

The year was 1995 and Glass remembers "there were lots of super competent, beautifully reported, analytical, thoughtful stories by great reporters."

But he also remembers thinking that there wasn't enough of some things on the air, and one of those things was an element of fun.

"There's a kind of story they do on the radio," he says, describing moments that he would hear occasionally on one of the daily shows — moments that would make him take pause and really listen. "There are characters and emotional moments and funny moments and scenes — and you're so just totally caught up in the story And I thought someone could make a show just out of those stories. You know, just basically do those stories and that would be a fun show to listen to."

So Glass' ambition was to do the things that he felt public broadcasting did at its best: tell stories of people who would never be on the radio or television anywhere else, provide a perspective people would never hear anyplace else, and at the same time offer what he describes as "a piece of candy" — in other words, pure entertainment.

"The idea is that people would listen not because it would make them better citizens, but because they would not be able to turn off the radio," says Glass.

It seems Glass and his team at Chicago Public Media have accomplished this goal. After premiering on WBEZ in 1995, "This American Life" is now heard on more than 500 public radio stations each week, distributed by Public Radio International.

Most weeks it is the most popular podcast in America. The show is also aired on the CBC in Canada and on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's network.

"This American Life" has won several Peabody and DuPont-Columbia awards, and The American Journalism Review declared the show to be "at the vanguard of a journalistic revolution."

Each week's episode is built around a theme, though Glass said the theme usually begins with a story that the staff loves, and then they search for other stories to go with it.

For example, Glass once met someone on a train who told him the story of a shark attack she lived through. This was paired with comedian Tig Notaro's story about being diagnosed with cancer, the two linked together as stories about near-death experiences. From there, the staff went on the hunt for other stories that fit the theme.

"It's a disturbingly random process," says Glass, when asked how he searches for stories. "It's like trying to harness luck as an industrial product." He explains that sometimes listeners pitch stories to them, sometimes staff members stumble across stories, and sometimes someone on staff will get curious about something and then start to investigate it — which is what happened when they created the Peabody Award-winning episode about what went wrong in the mortgage industry.

"The key for us is to find stories that are surprising enough and sparkly enough," Glass says. "We will go through 15 or 20 story ideas for a particular show, and go into production on seven or eight of those stories. It's clear which ones are the most amazing and surprising and compelling, and so in the end it will whittle down to just three or four stories."

He adds, "It's sort of like if you want to get hit by lightning (then) you have to wander around for a really long time in the rain."